November 28, 2008

"While the textual-artifactual approach to studying human beings produces remarkable insights and important understandings, it tends to separate the artifacts from the stream of human behavior that produces and uses them. The text needs to be studied as a unified whole. The human process should be the object of the study. One can trace a movement in this direction through a number of thinkers and researchers. Two are the most directly relevant: Dell Hymes-the concept of the ethnography of communication (1964), and Sol Worth-the study of visual forms as culturally structured communicative systems (1966)."